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Intel gets into the flash hard drive game

Intel has announced its first entry into the hard drive replacement market. Is …

Intel announced today that the company is releasing its first entry into the flash-based hard drive market. The Z-U130 Value Solid-State Drive will be available in 1GB, 2GB, 4GB and 8GB models and boasts sustained write speeds of 28MB per second. This is comparable to the low end of magnetic platter hard drives, which have typical write speeds varying from 30MB to 75MB per second. The drives are contained in a 3.5cm by 2.5cm package and connect via a USB 1.1 or 2.0 interface using a standard 2x5 USB connector.

"Solid state drive technology offers many benefits over traditional hard disk drives including improved performance and reliability," said Randy Wilhelm, vice president of Intel's NAND Products Group. "The Intel solid state drive technology provides robust performance, while offering Intel's industry leading quality, validation and reliability for a wide variety of embedded applications."

Concerns about the long-term lifetime of flash drives should be minimal, as Intel puts each device through 1,000 hours of reliability testing and estimates the mean time before failure (MTBF) of the drive at approximately 5 million hours.

The idea of using memory instead of spinning magnetic storage is not new—battery-backed RAM drives were available in the 1980s for platforms such as the Apple ][. However, only recently has the speed, price, capacity, and reliability of flash-based storage improved to the point where they can be seriously considered for replacing standard hard drives in some situations. Enthusiasts and DIYers have been building systems with Flash drives using tools such as Compact Flash-to-IDE adapters—the machine I am writing this on uses such an interface—but this move by Intel shows that the idea is now moving into the mainstream. There are even rumors that Apple plans to introduce a flash-based subnotebook some time this year.

Intel expects its new drives to find their way into servers, emerging market notebooks and even some low-cost, fully featured PCs. Pricing has not yet been announced, but Intel says its 4GB model will be comparable with 1.8 inch hard drives by the second half of this year, and will surpass pricing of 2.5 inch drives by 2008. The 1GB and 2GB versions are already in production, with the 4GB scheduled for deliver in April, while the 8GB version won't make its appearance until December.